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End of the year top three: US home furniture market, Saudi mega-city, hardware startups

End of the year, time to draw conclusions. This blog is reaching a wider audience day by day: more than 3.000 visitors per year with a +10% average increase. Here’s a top three of 2015’s most read and shared posts: US home furniture market and its evolution, the Saudi project to build a mega-city from scratch and, finally, the boom of the hardware startup.

US are confirmed as one of the most important international markets for the home and design products industry. The overall market volume is now over 123 USD billions and is growing with an interesting 2% pace, fully recovering after the dramatic decrease during the 2007-2009 crisis. Great news especially for those suppliers (like many Made in Italy manufacturers exporting in USA) investing in quality and innovation for high end products.

Great opportunities are expected in 2016, while the TTIP negotiations are going on.

KAEC (pronounced cake) or King Abdullah Economic City is a megacity project designed to build a whole urban area from scratch only 30 minute drive from Jeddah on the coastline. It’s a very ambitious project and (almost) unique in the world, that will be the key driver to a further diversification in the Saudi economy. The project has been already announced several years ago, among many doubts of the international media, and should be completed within 2025 with an overall cost of 100 billion dollars.

It could be a driver for a further development in Saudi Arabia and in the MENA region, and spread new opportunities to exporting countries especially in the architecture and design industry.

The Internet of Things keeps leading innovation and boosting the growth of thousands of startups worldwide, hardware startups are now one of the main targets of the smartest venture capitalists and tech investors. In this scenario hardware accelerators, that make possible to “productize” your idea and quickly ship your products after the design, test and debug phases, are gaining a growing strategic importance. We’ve been recently interviewing startupper from all over the world reshaping the home automation and Internet of Things market, with cutting edge solutions. Here we interviewed Cyril Ebersweiler, founder of Haxlr8r, who shared with us his awesome insights on the hardware startup scenario.